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Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the old
business truism says. But you also may have heard that you can’t
know where you’re going without knowing where you have been.

To get a sense of which industries small businesses are growing
in, the analysts at Raleigh, N.C.-headquartered private-company
financial-information company Sageworks ran some numbers for
Entrepreneur.com. Here’s a look at the industries where U.S.
companies with $10 million or less in annual sales have shown
the highest and lowest percentage change from Jan. 1 to Dec
31, 2012. As a benchmark, the average growth rate across all
U.S. small businesses in the time period was 8 percent, says
Libby Bierman, an analyst at Sageworks.

The good news for entrepreneurs is that much of the fastest
growth is in service businesses, which can be started without a
lot of money to buy equipment and inventory, says Bierman.
Software development, management consulting and architecture
firms have been frontrunners have been for a few years now, says
Bierman.

Not all of the businesses on the fastest-growing list are service
based. In particular, the residential housing market has just
started to recover, and that is supporting businesses related to
the construction industry, including foundation and exterior
construction and specialty contractors. A lot of construction
projects were abandoned during the recession and so part of the
bounce in construction is businesses and individuals picking back
up old half-finished projects.

Business services and construction are looking strong in the
coming years. “They provide services that are, maybe not
critical, but very much needed by other businesses and people who
are trying to even grow their homes,” Bierman says. “I don’t see
these industries going anywhere. Maybe their growth rate won’t be
as high as it has been, but I don’t think it will be a decline
anytime soon.”

A list of the fastest-growing industries for all businesses would
include manufacturing, says Bierman, but most successful
manufacturers have more than $10 million in annual revenue.
“Manufacturing as a whole has been something that has pretty
positive news lately,” she says. “If those manufacturers are
having pull, the middlemen, or the wholesalers that are
transacting those sales, will continue to see growth, too.”

During the depths of the recession, many industries were
contracting. Now, almost all industries are growing, albeit some
at more sluggish rates. The slower-growth companies are not
seeing impressive growth rates because they are entrenched in
technology that is becoming obsolete, such as printing. But some
of those industries are seeing slower growth simply because they
have relatively inelastic demand. For example, an economic
recession does not change the fact that sick people need to go to
the doctor. The growth rate for physician’s offices does not
typically change drastically.

Overall, the home health-care industry has seen positive growth
rates in revenue over the past year as consumers look for an
alternative to moving into a nursing care facility, says Bierman.
Skilled nursing care facilities come up on this list as a
shrinking, but that’s partly because of the restrictions placed
on the data. For this research, Sageworks included only those
businesses with less than $10 million in annual revenue. The
decline in skilled nursing care facilities may be an indication
that smaller facilities are losing ground to their larger
competitors or home health care alternatives, she says.